684 W- M- DAVIS 



even though we afterward find it desirable to treat human responses 

 in a separate cliapter. For even if man's will sets him high above 

 the other forms of life, it must not be forgotten that his will often leads 

 him along physiographic lines, and that he possesses many struc- 

 tures and habits entirely independent of his will, and similar to the 

 structures and habits of lower animals as examples of ontographic 

 responses. Even human houses and roads are only different in degree 

 from the houses and roads made by animals of many kinds. Still 

 more, if we accept the principle of the continuity of geography through 

 geology, we must recognize that most of the successive geographies 

 of the past have had nothing to do with the human will, and that man 

 and his works are after all only modern innovations. 



The chief impediment to action upon this view, which, as I have 

 said, has been unfolded before us by the progress that our science 

 has already made, is the habit of studying geography and geology too 

 separately, and of regarding the former as a subject for narrative 

 treatment, while the latter is admittedly a subject for scientific investi- 

 gation. The hint to this effect that is given by the unlike constitution 

 of geographical and geological societies the world over ought not to 

 pass unnoticed. Membership in many geological societies is limited 

 to experts ; if membership in a single geographical society is similarly 

 restricted, I have yet to learn of it. 



Let us then build on the progress we have made ; let us reahze that 

 only when ontography is treated as thoroughly as physiography will 

 geographical work gain the best geographical flavor. So empirical 

 has been the traditional geographical treatment of the organic elements, 

 so imperfectly have the organic elements been generally recognized 

 as balancing the inorganic elements in the make-up of the subject as a 

 whole, that no name has come into use for the organic half of geog- 

 raphy corresponding to physiography for the inorganic half; and it 

 is to supply this lack that I have elsewhere suggested the name above 

 used. I believe that the adoption of some such name would aid in 

 the systematic cultivation and in the symmetrical development of 

 geography, and thus of geology also as a whole, by bringing more 

 prominently forward the necessity of giving — or at least attempting 

 to give — as scientific a treatment to the inhabitants of a region in 

 their geographic relations as to the region itself. 



